


Hypnagogia (oh, sweetheart, how long will you fight)

by Tiss



Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Crackpot Theories, Derealization, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Explicit Language, Fix-It, Gen, Hopeful Ending, It Gets Worse Before It Gets Better, It Makes Sense in Context, M/M, Mildly Graphic Violence, Mind Screw, Mostly hurt, Non-Explicit Sex, Post-Game(s), Potentially Disturbing Themes, Psychological Trauma, Suicidal Thoughts, Suicide, The Astrals are dicks, a lot of confusion, attempt?, concrit welcome, for a price, it gets kinda weird, questionable mental states, repeated major character death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-07
Updated: 2020-06-07
Packaged: 2021-03-04 03:14:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,042
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24586696
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tiss/pseuds/Tiss
Summary: (A stupid man once said, “There is no suffering without meaning.”)A series of nightmares.Or, Noctis wakes up when he should be dead, and nothing is the same as it was.
Relationships: Background Gladiolus Amicitia/Noctis Lucis Caelum, Gladiolus Amicitia & Prompto Argentum & Noctis Lucis Caelum & Ignis Scientia
Comments: 16
Kudos: 47





	Hypnagogia (oh, sweetheart, how long will you fight)

**Author's Note:**

> READER WARNING: Mind the Tags, peeps. And that summary is no effin’ joke. It ends as well as it can, but it goes through some rough spots on the way there.
> 
> In-parentheses part of the title comes from ATHETOSIS by Crywolf.
> 
> This fic is a standalone companion-slash-lead-in to a post-game series I’m working on at the moment. When I start posting it, I’ll update this fic with a link to that.
> 
> EDIT June 25, 2020: [It Takes a City](https://archiveofourown.org/series/1788979), that post-game series, is up. Also, changed one (1) line in **2.** that should make some things clearer, but probably isn't worth re-reading the fic over.

**1.**

Noctis wakes up slumped on the throne of Lucis, and sunlight is streaming in through the broken wall.

He traverses the halls of the Citadel in the same silence that accompanied him on the way up. Black marble, sleek golden lines, the clicking of his shoes, echoing. Cold imitation sunlight glowing above. In the lobby, everything is quiet still. His friends aren’t in the plaza, where he left them.

Ardyn is.

He looks at Noctis, one eye mocking, the other bereaved, and says to him, “It looks like you’ve failed, _Your Majesty_ ,” and there’s enough contempt loaded into those two words to wilt flowers.

Noctis could wring his neck. It’s an automatic, ingrained response; he recognizes it for what it is.

“What do you mean, failed,” he asks. “The Starscourge is gone.”

“Indeed it is,” the man drawls. “From the atmosphere, at the very least. Perhaps you have, in fact, succeeded, and all this is part of the big Astral plan.”

Noctis waits. Ardyn is the type for dramatic pauses; they both know that.

“But if it is, King of Night,” Ardyn’s face goes solemn, “then even daemons are not that cruel.”

“What are you talking about,” Noctis growls.

“See for yourself,” Ardyn answers, flippant, and turns to leave. Noctis lets him.

The sun beats down on him. He calls for his friends; when they don’t respond, he heads to the Kingsglaive base camp in the subway. He walks amidst the rubble, and the city stands dusty and still around him. Battles were raging here just yesterday, daemons and MTs and Glaives, and now there’s just debris.

There’s no one at the base. Not a single soul. All the lights are on, and all the personal belongings are still there by the bunks. There’s even a mug of coffee left out to go cold. It’s like everyone just went for a smoke break. All at once.

All the stuff is still here. They can’t be that far.

But his exploration of the nearby streets and tunnels gives him no answers. There are no people and no bodies, just crumbled stone and fisured concrete.

He returns to the empty base and turns it upside down to find a working phone. Cor’s logged in it as Captain. He listens to the tone for a full minute. Nobody answers.

He dials again.

He dials every other number in the contacts.

He dials Cor for the third time.

_‘Even daemons are not that cruel.’_

No way.

_No. No panicking. Reason first,_ Noctis tells himself firmly.

_‘Rational thinking, Noct,’_ sounds Ignis’ voice in his head, recalled. _‘You need to take the problem step by step. And always, always have contingency plans. Several would be best.’_

Right. Contingencies. Right.

Where would he go, if they got separated? They hadn’t set a place, there’d been no need, no real plans for _after_. Or, well, they’d defaulted to the Kingsglaive base. Other than that…

Noctis walks all the way to where they left the car. The keys are still tucked behind the visor. He hesitates, then gets out and scratches an N, an H, and an arrow from one to the other in the concrete with a random scrap of metal. It makes his teeth hurt, but it’s more than what the others have bothered to leave behind. If the guys are still in the city somewhere, they can get a ride with the Glaives.

All he finds in Hammerhead is a ghost town.

Everything is still lit up bright, with flood lights outdoors and normal lamps indoors. It’s just like he’d left it.

Except there are no hunters milling about in the diner. No guards at the gates. No one answering the doors he pounds on. Not a single message anywhere from anyone, except for the emptiness and the stillness: _We’re not here_.

Step by step. Contingencies.

Noctis checks the pumps and fills up the tank. He hopes it will be enough to take him to Lestallum.

He doesn’t bother leaving a message.

He guns it all the way across Leide, but by the time he reaches the Malacchi hills, the monotony has brought him if not to a calm, then at least to a semblance of it. Now that there’s less urgency drilling into his brain, he notices he isn’t hungry, even though the sun is now setting and he hasn’t eaten anything all day. He doesn’t have any food with him anyway, so it’s for the best. He isn’t tired, either, although his ankle is cramping up, and his knee is stiff despite the brace. That contraption is going off for the night.

He curls up in the backseat and thinks that his leg is going to be impossible tomorrow, with how he’s sleeping.

He doesn’t sleep a wink.

When his appropriated phone reads 3 AM, he gives up and steps outside. The silence is absolute; it gets into the cracks forming in his mind, and he turns the engine on just to hear something that’s not his own breathing. Logically, he understands that he cannot possibly be panicking still: the human body is not built to sustain a sharp response like that over a prolonged period of time. He knows that, yet logic also offers no answers. He mutes his thoughts as much as he can, like he used to do inside the Crystal, turns the engine off and tries to catch the sounds of a distant wind, at least, but the night is completely still.

The night is also pretty chilly. He fires the car back up and gets some heating going.

He keeps hoping for someone to drive past him.

As soon as dawn begins to break, he gets back on the road.

Duscae is absolutely teeming with wildlife. It’s like a decade without sunlight had never happened. None of the animals come very close to the road, but there’s a good stretch where he can see pretty far out across Alstor Slough, and those are definitely several herds of garulas and a group of towering catoblepas. The bugs are out in force, too, which is pretty much the norm for the area, but he feels as if even those are more numerous than usual.

And everything that used to be green before is still green now, against all the scientific impossibility of it.

He makes it to Lestallum by mid-afternoon, and he’d already half-expected it to be empty just because of that saying about things that come in threes, but it still leaves him with trembling hands and a tightness in his chest when the city is as devoid of human beings as everywhere else he’s been.

It is uncanny in the extreme to see Lestallum’s main squares so utterly quiet, especially in the light of day. The people here worked hard and played hard; most leisure businesses, like restaurants and bars, would stay open well into the night, and the noise never really died down all the way.

Now, there are no tables and no café owners hawking their specialties, no street vendors and no carts, no plant workers on break – just wind throwing trash around.

Cable cars still go back and forth, servos whining. Those can probably work autonomously for a little while; Noct would go check if there’s any sign of human presence in the control room, but he has no idea where that could be.

He looks anyway. It’s not like he has anything better to do.

As he walks the streets, he notices other things, too, things that are different from how he remembers Lestallum – missing people aside. The streets look like people have been sleeping in them: there are grimy blankets spread out alongside cardboard and just junk, the inescapable detritus of human life, with the occasional sleeping bag here and there. There are conspicuously modern flood lights hanging from above, bulky and plastic; they look like something that could’ve only come out of Insomnia. They’re on, too, flooding every nook and cranny with bright, untinted light. The only shadow he ever casts is right between his feet.

He doesn’t find the cable car control room, in the end.

Night falls. He tries to locate somewhere that sells clothes, or has them at the very least; instead, he finds something that seems to be a distribution point of some sort: there are boxes with clothes stacked inside them, sorted by type – t-shirts, pants, underwear. The quality is subpar, but it makes a sad sort of sense. It must all be second-hand.

He wonders how much of this clothing belonged to people who are now dead.

Probably all of it, now.

He stuffs his torn, restrictive raiment in the Armory without looking at it twice.

The bed in the Leville is just as he remembers it. It’s plenty comfortable. He isn’t tired, and he can’t sleep.

He isn’t hungry, either, but when it becomes apparent he’s going to stay awake, he makes himself comb through the hotel’s pantry. Ignis’ voice rings in his mind, nagging about eating if at all possible to keep up strength. He finds a can of soup, heats it up, and spoons the stuff into his mouth little by little. It tastes like nothing.

He doesn’t feel sick for eating, at least. In fact, he doesn’t feel anything.

He spends what is probably days wandering the city. It’s hard to keep count. The passage of time is near irrelevant, without bodily needs to tend to or other people to meet or much visible difference in lighting between night and day, what with all the lamps always lit. It’s not that much different from the past ten years, in fact, expect for the change in stage dressings. Less looming hulk of armor and abstract, shifting currents of color, more all of Eos without a single human soul or body in sight.

He thinks of the possibility that, maybe, he never made it out of the Crystal.

He can’t prove that he has.

He also can’t prove that he hasn’t.

His thoughts run around in circles for a long time. He stops eating and sleeping, first because he forgets to, later because he wants to see if it’ll make any difference.

A week passes by, carefully counted, and it makes no difference, so he stops bothering.

A week passes, and he’s tired of worrying.

He meets the coming dawn on the outlook, feeling drained and listless. Slumped on a bench, he looks at the lightening sky and doesn’t let himself think about anything except how pretty it is.

Somewhere off to the side, really close, Prompto says, “Damn, wish I had my camera with me,” and Noctis whips his head around so fast his neck cracks.

There’s no one there.

Voice feeble, he asks, “Prom?”

There’s nothing.

But, but maybe –

“Prom?!”

He sounds more than a little hysterical, but he really doesn’t care.

There’s no response.

He waits.

There’s no response.

Slowly, slowly, he relaxes, sits back down – falls down, more like – when did he even stand up? He sits there, staring at the sky, and tries to hold back the sudden flood of tears burning his eyes. It fucking hurts. Why is he even bothering, it’s not like there’s anyone around to see.

Oh Six.

He’d rather be dead than here like this. It’s a well-worn thought with a new flavor.

A sharp, familiar bark sounds a ways behind him.

Noctis freezes.

He doesn’t want to look.

He looks.

It’s Umbra.

The dog sits above the stairs, on the upper tier of the outlook, ears pointed forward in alertness, and just looks at him, inscrutable. When Noctis rises, Umbra does as well, and when Noctis steps forward, Umbra shuffles backwards. There’s something cautious about his behavior. About the way he’s looking at Noctis.

“Hey,” Noctis says, reaching a hand out, and Umbra bolts.

Immediately, Noctis dashes after him, up the stairs and across the terrace and up some more stairs, but four legs are so much faster than two. He follows Umbra along the main road and it almost feels like he’s gaining when he dives into an alleyway after it.

By the time he turns the corner, the dog is gone.

He checks the street that the alleyway opens into, just to be sure, but there’s no trace of Umbra, no sound of claws clacking on stone, no sign that anything living had run through. Noctis wasn’t really hoping to track it; the Messengers have their own ways of coming and going. He’d just… chased it. He wasn’t thinking.

He doesn’t want to stay in Lestallum any longer.

It takes him almost an hour to start the car. He didn’t have the foresight to park it at the gas station, so he has to drive over, kill the engine, fill up and then do the same song and dance of coaxing the thing to life again. Prompto could’ve figured something out, probably. He’d always been into that sort of stuff.

He drives and imagines Prompto riding along in the car with him. Complaining about the heat, the roads, the lack of decent songs on the radio. Enthusing about the sights, the animals, the latest campaign in King’s Knight. Needling Noctis about his driving habits, and getting teased right back.

He drives, and it’s almost like he’s talking to Prompto for real.

It takes a little over a day to get to Cape Caem. He pokes his head into the house, calls out a couple times, and, seeing no sign of life, backs right out. He has no desire to stay anywhere that used to have people around.

He goes down to the little dock instead, the one they’d all camped out by at some point. There’s a breeze coming from the sea, briny and cool, and he reaches into the Armory without thinking. Pulls out his fishing rod. The tackle box. A folding chair. Settles in.

He sits there, rod propped up at the edge of the dock, and it almost feels like everything’s okay.

“Sure nice out here.”

“Yeah,” Noctis agrees quietly, and glances down at Gladio.

His Shield sits on the dock next to the chair, one leg bent upright, the other flat on its side, and looks out over the sea. This, too, has happened before. Noctis has seen it exactly like this.

Gladio’s hair doesn’t move in the breeze. The weather was still, the last time.

“How’s it biting?”

“Like shit.”

It’s true. Nothing seems to be biting at all.

“What’re you gonna do after this?”

Noctis feels his teeth clench.

“Don’t know, don’t care,” he says, trying not to sound like he’s forcing it out.

“You know you can’t keep going on like this.”

“Like what?”

“Tumbling with the wind without a purpose. It’ll fuck you up.”

Noctis doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t want to think about it.

“Noct,” Gladio sighs, heavy and tired and too much like Ignis. “You’re a king, aren’t you?”

“King of what,” he grinds out, bitter – still, or anew, who the fuck even knows now, because it was shit from the start, a country backed into a corner and a defense built with royal blood and it was all a celestial farce anyway so what did it _matter_ , any of it, the loss and the fear and, and, and all the fucking guilt, since everyone’s _gone anyway_ –

“A king walks ever onward,” says Gladio like citing a poem – knowing him, he actually is – and –

and something in Noctis breaks.

He yells, screeches, “I FUCKING DID!” His throat is full of barbed wire. “I FUCKING DID, AND LOOK WHERE IT GOT ME!”

He drags a sandpapery breath through his barbed-wire throat, in and out, and then another, and then another still, until he feels like he won’t full-out sob with the next one. His hands are trembling.

He glances to the side, and Gladio’s not there.

Terror rips through him like a blizzard, makes his limbs run cold and tingle with electricity all at once. He whirls around, looks everywhere, but there’s no one, no one at all, no sign of Gladio having ever been there, just the sea and the rocky cliffside beach and the azure-blue sky, empty and empty and empty.

“Gladio?!”

Nothing.

“Gladio!”

No one.

He knows, logically, that it was just a hallucination. He knows. But.

But.

“Please come back,” he says to the nothing, voice shaky and quiet and pleading, and his eyes hurt so much. “Don’t leave me by myself here, I’m sorry, just don’t – I just – “

His knees give out, and he crumples to the damp wood of the dock. He just – he’s just tired. So tired. Tired like he’ll never be able to stand up again. Tired like there’s no point in standing up. Like he’s just going to sit there until death comes for him. _If_ it ever does. He doesn’t know what he’ll do if it doesn’t. If he’ll do anything at all.

He cries.

Crying hurts.

He can’t stop for a long time.

Eventually, the color of sunlight goes orange, and he notices it’s getting late. He goes to pick up his fishing gear, but then realizes that the rod is missing. It must’ve fallen into the water, or some unlucky fish had dragged it down into the depths.

What’s one more loss.

He shoves the rest of his stuff into the Armory, body heavy and sluggish, and turns to leave. He doesn’t look up from the planks. He’s so tired. How he’ll ever get up the cliffside is a mystery.

An animal yips over on the waterfront, and when he looks up, he sees a white dog.

Pryna.

Noctis stands still, afraid to scare her off, but she smiles a happy doggy grin and rushes over to him, tail wagging so hard it makes noise, and he drops to one knee to bury his hands in her fur. She licks his face, tearsalt and all, and he hides it in her shoulder and struggles not to cry again.

She’s so warm.

Pryna lets him hug her until he feels more or less stable again, and when he stands back up, she turns around and trots a little ways ahead, then stops and looks back at him, as if to check if he’s following.

He follows.

She leads him back up to the house, and the place doesn’t seem quite so empty with her around. He still doesn’t sleep, but Pryna seems to, so he curls around her on one of the beds and drifts intermittently through the night. He runs through memories of communal dinners and games here at the Cape, with the guys and Iris and Talcott, needles out details and weaves them together until he feels a little warmer, a little safer.

They’re nice memories. They’re all he has left.

In the morning, he and Pryna set out for Insomnia.

He spends a good hour trying to make the car’s engine turn, but it doesn’t make a single peep whatever he does. He still has a couple canisters of gas in the trunk, so he tries that, but has no luck. To make it worse, absolutely none of the cars left behind in Caem seem to be in running condition, and he doesn’t even know how to hotwire the ones that don’t have the keys hidden inside them. There are no birds at the rental post, either, which makes sense once he thinks about it.

He decides to walk instead.

It’s not like he’s short on time.

They fall into a sort of rhythm as they traverse the countryside, Pryna and he. She stays within sight of him at all times, even when she’s chasing birds out of bushes or prancing ahead to investigate whatever sign of animal life was left on the road. They travel along highways, which are slowly collecting dirt on top of their asphalt, ambling forward without much hurry, and wait out the nights and the rainy days in the old tent that Noctis has saved in his Armory. He’s still not very good at putting it up, but he’s good enough.

The sky has so many more stars in it than he remembers. When he’s stretched out on his back, looking at it, he feels like he could drown in it if not for Pryna’s warmth at his side. It’s a heady feeling.

He doesn’t remember the roads nearly well enough to find his way, but whenever he gets confused, Pryna seems to know where to go. She doesn’t seem to need food or water, either. He loses track of days, completely, this time, but he knows they spend a long time on the road by the amount of dirt and dog hair gathered on his clothes. It’s a little disgusting, but mostly he doesn’t care. Pryna certainly doesn’t.

Insomnia is about the same as he left it: ruined, dusty, and completely devoid of human life. Droves of birds have moved in, though, and left their marks in droppings and feathers on the streets. Pryna has an absolute blast charging into groups of them with loud barks and making them scatter in panicked flight, and Noctis finds himself smiling at her antics – a gesture so well-forgotten his cheeks hurt after just a few minutes. His chest feels lighter than it has in a long time. It’s distant, but it’s there.

They pick their way through the city, and Pryna subtly leads him towards the heart of it, the half-destroyed, towering Citadel. It still looms far above everything that’s still standing, a beacon of destruction in the midst of even more destruction. It doesn’t hurt nearly as much as he’d expected, to look at it.

Looking at his father’s commemorative plate in front of the building does.

There’s a pedestal-mounted sarcophagus on top of it, one that wasn’t there before. Noctis can tell, even from several paces away, that it’s his father’s figure that’s rendered in stone on top of it. Pryna gallops ahead and rears up to put her front paws on top, wagging her tail in delight; when she looks back at Noctis, he sees her grinning.

“Yeah, girl,” he says, “That’s dad.”

She pants at him and turns back towards the monument, only to jump up on it in the next second. Before he can chide her for it, she jumps down on the other side of the pedestal and vanishes from sight.

When he comes close to the sarcophagus, he can see that Pryna’s not there anymore.

“So that’s it, huh,” he mumbles to himself, and feels exhaustion rise in him, slow like the tide.

With a long sigh, he sits down with his back to the pedestal and rests his head back on it. He has no more energy to walk anywhere, even though he was feeling fine just a minute ago, and even if he did, he has no idea where he would go next. It feels like he’s come full circle. Like the journey’s finished, and it’s time to die.

He thinks about it and realizes he’s right: his little jaunt across Lucis was a facsimile of The Roadtrip, and he’s expecting it to end the same way. Honestly, he wouldn’t mind it so much at this point. For all that it had hurt the first time around, it probably wouldn’t now. He has no one left to lose. No citizens, no family, no friends. No pets.

He huffs a weak, sarcastic half-laugh. Even the magical dog ran away from him.

“Hey, dad?” He tilts his head back as far as it will go. It doesn’t really allow him to see his father’s statue, but it’s the thought that counts. “Did you know this was how it would end up?”

He might have. The man had always seemed to know more than he let on. Who the fuck even knows anymore.

A tiny little ember of anger catches fire.

He raises his voice and calls out, “Bahamut!” His voice doesn’t echo, but he would’ve liked it to. “Is this how you planned it?! Did you mean to shit on everything I’ve done for this planet?! For my people?!”

The Draconian doesn’t answer, and Noctis feels such an overwhelming wave of rage he almost throws up.

“Well, fuck you, then!”

He yells it loud enough to strip his throat raw.

Then, in a moment, all that angry energy seems to evaporate, and all he’s left with is the exhaustion, sunk into the marrow of his spine and the center of his brain. There’s nothing. There’s just… Nothing. His mind slows down until it’s almost blank.

He closes his eyes and waits to die. He thinks he might be waiting a long time, but he doesn’t care anymore.

He drifts.

“Oh, bother.”

It’s Ardyn’s voice.

Noctis drags his eyes open.

“Is that all you’re going to do? Sit there waiting for something to end you?”

Ardyn strolls into his field of vision, looking for all the world like the disappointed owner of a dog that got into the trash again. He stands in front of Noctis, hands on his hips, and looks down at him with a chastising mien.

Noctis doesn’t answer, and Ardyn sighs.

In a put-out voice, he asks, “Do I have to do _everything_ for you?”

Noctis doesn’t answer.

Ardyn calls up a sword and strides forward.

When the steel plunges into his stomach and makes a hole in it, above all the pain, above the ringing in his ears and the spots in his vision, he feels a warm pressure on the nape of his neck, on the bare skin of it. It feels like a hand, big and dry and calloused. A familiar hand.

_It’s going to be alright_ , his father whispers in his ear, and Noctis believes him.

**2.**

Noctis wakes up somewhere soft and warm. Distantly, he’s aware that there’s something wrong with that, but he’s absurdly comfortable and completely disinclined to think. Still, the veil of sleep recedes in increments, and more and more details pop into his mind. The weight of a quilt over his body. The pressure of something solid against his knee. The hint of a familiar smell tickling his nose.

The sword in his gut.

Which isn’t there.

He’s sitting up and clutching at his stomach before the thought’s finished percolating, but there’s no wound, no bandages, nothing. Just a shirt, and the flesh underneath, unbroken.

He’s in his own bed, at his apartment in Insomnia, and he’s breathing heavy because he’d just – he’d just been –

“Noct?”

Noctis turns around.

There’s an indent in the wrinkled mess of sheets where he’d been lying, and next to it, there’s Gladio, slouched against the headboard with a book in his lap – still young, still with just one scar, big and solid and _there_ in a very material way. He’s looking at Noctis with a hint of concern, and as the seconds stretch and Noctis’ breathing evens out, the expression morphs into something more complicated to parse.

“Nightmare?” Gladio asks.

He isn’t sure, but – “Yeah.”

What in the _world_ is going on here?

He was in Insomnia and died – or did he? – and then he was alone on an empty Eos and died – or did he? – and now he’s, what, back home? Hanging out in his bedroom with one of his closest friends? Napping, apparently? Did he dream all of that other stuff up?

If he did, why is it taking him so long to find his bearings?

He has no idea how he’s ended up in his bed, in his apartment, in an Insomnia that’s still standing, and it’s not exactly terrifying, but it doesn’t make much sense, either.

He flops back on the bed, next to Gladio, and rubs at his face.

He can feel the warmth of Gladio’s side right by his shoulder. It’s a little weird, and a little thrilling. Intimate. Like he hadn’t spent many a night crammed in a tent with Gladio and the others. But the last time they did that was ten years ago – wasn’t it? No, there had been one last night, right before… It all feels like memories of a past life. Too divorced from this – this reality, movie set, whatever it is.

There’s some shifting on Gladio’s side, and then a remark, “Wedding jitters getting to you?”

Something about the tone of his voice is strange. Tense. It should’ve sounded teasing, but instead, it’s – Noctis can’t figure it out. There’s too much packed into it.

Also, _wedding_? Does that mean they’re setting out for Altissia soon?

He says, “I guess,” just because he doesn’t know what else to say. He can’t tell Gladio what the dream – dream? – had been about, he’ll think Noctis has gone completely nuts.

He glances up at Gladio, and his face looks unexpectedly pinched. It makes no sense, like everything else about this situation.

Gladio must notice him staring, because he looks down at Noctis and then immediately averts his gaze. It’s hardly a bashful gesture; more conflicted than anything else. He sits up from his slouch, puts his book away, shifts around in a way that makes him look uncomfortable in his own skin.

“Look,” he finally says, and Noctis can just hear the hint of hurt in his voice, “I know this whole situation is – not ideal. And… Ah, shit.” He lays a hand on the back of his own neck, scratches up into his hair, then looks Noctis straight in the eye. “I don’t know what else to say to you. We’ve been over this. I just…” He sighs. “I wish shit wasn’t what it is, but that’s not helpful at all. So.”

Gladio continues to stare determinedly somewhere to the side, and Noctis continues to mentally flounder. He doesn’t often see Gladio so openly guilt-ridden, of all things, but this is exactly what it’s like.

“It’s not like I get much say in the matter,” he says, because it’s true and because he needs himself to make sense, at the very least. This conversation keeps going off the rails; if Noctis could _see_ the rails, that would really help, but the revelation keeps on not coming.

With a scoff, Gladio gives him a look that is very clearly calling bullshit.

“Don’t give me that crap, you argued down both of our dads and the entire damn council for this. You get all the say you want, when you bother.” Tirade done, Gladio settles down and adopts that conflicted look again. “I just… Fuck, nevermind. I should get going, Iris wanted to spend some time with me, before, you know.”

He swings his legs off the bed and doesn’t even try to look at Noctis.

“Alright,” says Noctis, because there’s nothing else he can reasonably say right now.

Gladio walks to the door, but pauses there, turning around and meeting Noctis’ eyes. There’s a new resolve on his face, and a softness to it that Noctis doesn’t believe he’s ever seen before.

“Noct…” he says, “Don’t get me wrong. I’m not mad. I’m not thrilled that this has to happen now, sure, but I’m not mad. We’re gonna pull through.”

Whatever _that_ means. Noctis has given up on understanding anything tonight.

He nods anyway.

“Night, Noct,” says Gladio, still _soft_ , and Noctis doesn’t know what to do except say it back.

The front door clicks closed, and he falls back onto the bed.

His mind is swimming.

Noctis closes his eyes against the cottony feeling inside his skull and, without intending to, falls asleep.

…

He opens his eyes, but it’s like he’s opened his ears instead, because the familiar trilling of his phone drills into his brain immediately from the bedside. He rolls, smacks a hand down on it to make it quiet, and tries to remember, through the fog of sleep, if he has any Council meetings to sit in on today.

What comes to him is the realization that he’s not supposed to be here.

He sifts through his memories, latest to earlier, up to the point where a solid boulder of a gemstone absorbed him like he was water and it was a sponge, and decides that if he’s gone crazy at some point, at least his hallucinations are detailed.

When he takes a look at his phone screen, mercilessly bright in the blinds-dark room, the time reads 6:07 AM.

“Th’fuck.”

The next alarm is set for 6:10.

His front door opens with a click.

Noctis sits up in bed, wary. The door opens, closes. Someone takes their shoes off, puts something hard on the kitchen counter. It’s very quiet; the sounds carry.

There’s a knock on his bedroom door, and then Ignis’ voice.

“Noct? Are you awake?”

“Maybe?” he answers. “I’m not sure.”

Oh, the double meaning. Noctis could laugh.

There’s something that sounds kind of like a soft snort from Ignis; Noctis sees the shadows of his feet shift through the gap under the door.

“Go take a shower. Wash your hair. If I don’t hear water running within five minutes, I’m coming to check on you.”

“Yeah,” he croaks, then rubs at his face in a futile attempt to make his eyes stay open. If Ignis is here to make sure he’s up and functioning at this early-ass hour, it must be important.

He showers and drags himself to the kitchen, still bleary thanks to twenty minutes under warm water. There’s a mug of coffee waiting for him at the island counter, doctored to a very pale tan; he sinks down on the stool in front of it and drinks. Ignis tuts at him, fetches a bottle from the bathroom and begins to rub the stuff into Noctis’ hair. It smells faintly of perfume. The sun rises slowly, greenish light creeping downwards from the cabinets, soundless; Ignis works silently, and the streets down below are still quiet. The stillness of time in this kitchen-sized pocket of alternate reality makes Noctis feel calm. Like everything’s going to be fine.

The back of his neck tingles with remembered touch.

The sugar and the taste of coffee, more than any actual caffeine, gradually bring the rest of his brain online, and questions begin to pile up. He doesn’t know how much he can assume about his life, here; even if he’d dreamed all of his bumbling across Lucis, the Astrals, Altissia, everything, he can’t tell at which point reality ended and the dream began. It doesn’t feel like remembering a dream. The gods know that the sight of his three dearest friends standing at the bottom of Citadel stairs will probably never leave him.

He feels uneasiness rearing up inside him and promptly shoves the entire topic away. He’ll figure everything out later.

“What’s up next?” he asks Ignis, if only to get some inkling of his schedule for the day. He didn’t think to check his phone, not even for the date; he probably should have.

“As I’ve told you a dozen times,” Ignis answers with a hint of impatience, “you have breakfast with His Majesty at eight, followed by dress and makeup. A word for the press is scheduled for ten-thirty, then the ceremony at noon and a brief public appearance right after. You’ll have free time until the reception at five.”

“Ceremony?”

“The wedding, Noct,” Ignis says, tone flat in a way that indicates he’s given up on trying to make him function on his own.

Noctis isn’t listening for that, though.

The wedding is today.

As in, this morning.

Ceremony at noon.

Oh, gods.

Just when he thinks he’s got his feet under him, this strange alternate-reality-slash-dream pulls the rug out.

Ignis’ hand lands on his forehead.

He asks, “Have you fallen ill between this morning and last night?”

“What, no, no. I’m just – “ Should he tell Ignis, maybe? But no, later, he’ll deal with it later. He won’t be able to handle the scrutiny and play the role of a happy groom at the same time. “It’s really early, Specs.”

Ignis gives him a measuring look, says, “If you say so.” Noctis can hear he’s not convinced, but it’s fine. He’ll deal with it later.

…

He eats breakfast with his father. It’s a quiet affair – even more so than it usually is. The king barely says a word to him, and his brow is furrowed, which means he’s worried about something but doesn’t want to heap it on his son. Noctis eats without really tasting the food and watches the Citadel plaza through the window in between bites. People are beginning to fill in. He’s just one large gear in this beast of an event; it makes him feel inconsequential and apprehensive at the same time.

When they’re both done, he says, “I should probably be on time for the stylists,” and rises to leave. His father stands up as well, and when their paths intersect on the way out, he lays a hand on Noctis’ shoulder and stops him in his tracks. The look in his father’s eyes is still troubled, but reassuring, too, and most of all sincere.

“Noctis,” he says, “Even in these circumstances, I wish you will find happiness. With all of my heart.”

He’d hug his dad if there weren’t Glaives watching.

It only occurs to him once they’ve parted ways that he just saw his dad _alive_.

He really, really should’ve hugged him.

Nobody tries very hard to talk to him in makeup, which is just as well. He gets through the press minute with a handful of generic lines that he’d had all of five minutes to remember, and then he’s carted back to the stylists for “the final touch-up” and left to get dressed. The outfit is complicated as all get out, the kind of stiff ceremonial royal dress he loathes, and someone has to come in to get all the dangly golden bits to behave. At least the cape doesn’t trail.

He wishes his dad would come find him one last time before the event. Now that he’s aware how much he’d missed the man, it’s a gnawing pit inside his chest.

In front of the throne room, Gladio is waiting.

He’s dressed to the nines as well, in some kind of ceremonial getup Noctis had never seen before, black cape over his left shoulder, golden pauldron on his right, black boots and golden buttons all shined to a needle-sharp gleam. He straightens up when he sees Noctis, and his eyes glint for a second, but he doesn’t say anything right away.

His hair got cropped short at some point since the night before, and his beard is gone.

“Hey,” is all Noctis says, because asking what was up with the crew cut would be committing to a level of humor he won’t be able to maintain. It’s much too professional a job for a crew cut, anyway.

Gladio opens his mouth, closes it, then opens it again and says, almost hesitant, “You look great.”

Noctis can’t help but snort through his nose. _What the hell, Gladio._ “I’m fine without the encouragement, but thanks.”

Gladio rolls his eyes, but grins anyway.

He doesn’t know what Gladio is doing here, and he isn’t sure how all of this is supposed to go. How _does_ the groom get to the altar? He’s sure there had been rehearsals – rehearsals he _has no memory of_. Then again, that assumes there _should_ be memories and this isn’t just some bizarre, ultra-realistic dream. He still isn’t completely convinced.

There’s an awkward moment where Noctis doesn’t know at what point he’s supposed to go in, but the guards don’t move to open the doors and Gladio doesn’t say anything, so he waits. There’s a few more minutes left until noon, by his estimation. It’s a little worrying, but Noctis has been a prince for decades. He knows all about last-minute hold-ups in important ceremonies.

With nothing to do but wait and let his anxiety ramp up, he studies Gladio from the corner of his eye. He got worked over by the stylists, too, judging by the way his hair looks camera-ready but not stuffed chock-full of product. It strikes Noctis as a little strange, that Gladio should be subjected to the horror now when he had never been before, but what does he know.

Gladio notices his staring pretty quick, but then, instead of calling Noctis out on it, he does the weirdest thing.

He catches Noctis’ hand and gives it a squeeze.

Noctis has to grip his composure in an iron fist, because if he blushes now, with all the foundation and whatnot on his face, Six only know what kind of image will be captured for posterity by all the cameras waiting inside that room. He thinks about the few times they’d held hands as small children. He thinks about that one time Gladio kissed his hand – his signet ring, technically – for his induction ceremony as Noctis’ Shield. He thinks he should stop thinking.

The gesture was probably meant to be reassuring, but this is the most unmoored Noctis has felt all day.

A quiet knock comes from the other side of the doors, and Gladio’s hand falls away.

When the doors open and all the music and light flood out, Noctis is suddenly overwhelmed. He knows that the throne room is imposing by design, imposing and grandiose and stunning and all those adjectives that really impress the strength of the crown unto the minds of visitors, but he’s been in this room hundreds of times. He played in it as a toddler, if Ignis remembers it right. He is not intimidated.

Still, he can hardly hear himself think. It takes conscious effort to fix his posture and do it subtly, too, and then he freezes because he doesn’t know how quickly he’s supposed to walk. By some miracle, he makes out the small sound Gladio makes with his mouth, the Crownsguard signal that means ‘ _go’_ , and he tries his best to match their speeds. This wouldn’t be nearly as nerve-wracking if not for the cameras. Six, he hates the cameras.

It’s a little strange that his Shield is escorting him down the aisle, but he doesn’t have any spare brainpower at the moment for that thought.

In under a minute, Noctis is standing on the platform in the middle of the stairs, in front of the priestess and her lectern with the ornate Cosmogony on it. The music swells and cuts off; the sounds of all the damn shutters do not. His father is sitting on the throne, face unreadable. Gladio is _still_ standing next to him, which is weird to the extreme. Noctis’ mind is stuck in a loop of _‘What the fuck’_ concerning just about everything.

Only when the priestess starts her speech, the only speech a priestess could make at this point, does it dawn on him. His heart beats so loudly, he can barely hear her speak.

He can hear just enough.

Oh, Six.

Oh, gods above.

It’s _Gladio_.

He’s _marrying Gladio_.

_HOW?_

Something large bursts through the window.

Glass rains down.

The projectile crashes into the stairs behind Noctis. It’s loud enough to make him flinch. As he whirls around, the thing _whines_ like a strained engine.

Then stands up.

Noctis’ blood turns to ice water all at once.

There’s no time to think.

A second MT barrels in after the first, landing just a few paces further. In the blink of an eye, a wall of magic rises up between them and Noctis, and he notices all the screaming coming from the guests. He can’t see if they’re protected or not. A moment, and a hand grabs him around the bicep; he jerks, but it’s just Gladio, face wild and distantly terrified, greatsword at the ready.

Noctis’ body is on full alert, but his mind doesn’t seem to be catching up.

His father yells out Gladio’s name; when they both turn to look, he nods towards the exit, an unspoken command. Gladio grips Noctis’ arm tighter and _tugs_ , with the kind of force he usually restricts. It’s a measured, but completely unstoppable pull. Noctis moves with it. In the tumultuous mess of his thoughts, one snags.

They’re leaving his father behind.

“Gladio, my dad-!”

Gladio keeps pulling.

They’re leaving his dad behind _again_.

He twists his head to look, back at where his dad stands leaning on his cane with one hand and holding up the barrier with the other, at his dad who he didn’t get to hug, his dad, his dad –

Noctis is the thirty-year-old martyr king, and he is the reluctant twenty-year-old prince, and he is the eight-year-old who didn’t get to go to the seaside with his dad because his dad is the king and kings have to work a lot and he is the eight-year-old whose dad drove a huge daemon off a cliff and sat by his bedside smoothing his hair until he drifted off and carried him even though he was too big for it and he is he eight-year-old who learned to walk again to make his dad proud.

– his dad, who’d wanted Noctis to be _happy_ , and why, _why_ does he only understand now how valuable that is?!

He stumbles and almost runs straight into Gladio, who has stopped dead in his tracks.

Twisting to see around Gladio’s bulk, Noctis sees General Drautos in their way, an unusual sword in his hand. Something’s off about him, but he can’t put his finger on it. Gladio, judging by the way he keeps himself between them, seems to have noticed it too.

He manages to say, “Noct,“ before his head flies clean off.

Noctis hadn’t even seen Drautos move. His sword was just in one place at one moment, and in another the next, and in-between those, Gladio’s head disappeared.

Noctis’ mind can’t keep up.

Gladio’s body crumples to the floor, blood flowing from the neck, and Noctis follows it with his eyes, still struggling to process the latest events. Is Gladio dead? He must be. People don’t usually survive having their head cut off. And he saw Gladio’s head roll away. That means Gladio must be dead. His body has lost so much blood, too. Noctis doesn’t think anything could fix this.

Maybe he’ll wake up from this, too. He’ll wake up, and he’ll be in his old rooms in the Citadel, still a teenager, and he’ll have a training session with Gladio at some ungodly hour in the morning, and everything will have been a dream.

A sword punches into his chest, right under the breastbone, angled upwards. Noctis feels his heart seize and twist and burn. It hurts. It hurts a lot.

It doesn’t hurt for long.

**3.**

Noctis wakes up on a cot, in the curtained-off barracks of the Kingsglaive base under Insomnia, to the subdued murmur of Glaives going about their business and Ignis sitting in a folding chair next to him. As he’s blinking, disoriented, a tremor rocks the entire structure, and the lights flicker. Nobody seems alarmed by that.

He pinches the back of his hand. Nothing changes.

He’s so tired.

“Noct? Are you awake?”

He feels a sort of déjà-vu, hearing those words from Ignis’ mouth again.

He doesn’t really care.

“I don’t know,” he says, and it’s completely true because he’s too tired to say anything but. He doesn’t know. He’s so tired of all this. He asks aloud, “Is this some sort of nightmare?” and he doesn’t care.

Ignis remains silent for a moment, then sighs, long and subdued and endlessly defeated.

“Would that it were,” he says, quietly, almost to himself.

Noctis does nothing at all.

…

Everything sort of blurs together from there.

See, it’s funny because this is exactly what Ardyn had been talking about all that time ago, in front of the sun-lit Citadel, _it looks like you’re failed, Your Majesty_ , because Noctis had gone up to the throne room and the Crystal’s magic had backlashed across Eos and the daemons are still there.

It has been two full days since that. The sun hasn’t come up.

The Ring is gone.

They retreat to Hammerhead first, the four of them, silent and grim, and then to Lestallum when no one can come up with any kind of meaningful plan. The Astrals won’t answer. Umbra won’t appear. Ardyn’s in the wind; Cor’s promised to give them a call if he shows up again.

Nobody knows what to do.

Lestallum is pretty similar to how it was when Noctis was – was alone, only smellier, dirtier, and incredibly crowded. It’s not a comfort. People are crammed on top of each other, living in dormitories and bunkhouses and fiercely defensive of their space. Everywhere they go, there’s people.

It’s like everything was waiting for Noctis’ return to completely fall apart. Daemon activity climbs sky-high and just keeps climbing, and within a couple weeks, they lose half their hunters. The outposts are the next to go, with no one to protect the generators from getting wrecked, and then the lack of replacement parts catches up with food production.

Then some of those jam-packed people start to turn into daemons right in the middle of the city, in bright light, and everything descends into utter madness.

The mass panics every time it happens are bad enough; the vicious suspicion that starts to coalesce in every public space is worse. Worse still is the way people, even complete civilians, start to flee the city. Maybe they think the Scourge is infectious; maybe they’re just not thinking straight anymore. Nobody knows where they’re getting food.

Nobody knows what happens to them out there. Everyone suspects, though, because no one hears from them.

No one returns.

It takes about a month for the four of them to give up on sticking it out. They cull the daemon population around Lestallum, but it doesn’t go down, and food production doesn’t stabilize, and people keep turning into daemons, and at some point, a realization comes:

_this is it._

No one says it out loud, but they all think it.

The guys pull some strings and put together a good stockpile of food, and then they load it all in an old truck and strike out towards one of the nearby havens. They know it doesn’t matter if they go or not, if they keep hunting or not. They know there’s nothing more that can be done.

They just don’t want to watch.

So they drive out to a haven, and they put up their old tent and chairs, and they last exactly one hour without hunting because just sitting around and thinking makes it so much worse.

Prompto is the first. Maybe it’s the circumstances of his birth, maybe it’s just happenstance, but he’s the first. They wake up at some point, and Prom’s sitting by the fire clutching his tattooed forearm in a death grip, a heartbroken little smile on his face.

“Sorry, guys,” he says, still with that infernal smile.

The tips of his fingers are black.

Ignis leaves with him, despite the persuasions that he really doesn’t need to, and returns alone.

Not long after that, Ignis just leaves.

Noctis wakes up one time and finds a note in place of Ignis, shaky, lopsided print that’s barely legible on a mussed-up piece of paper. _I COULDNT BEAR TELL U. SORRY._

He sits by the fire, stares into the flames and wishes it would just end already.

He goes to Gladio, then. It’s a holdover from his childhood, from when he wouldn’t allow himself to bother his father any longer: he finds Ignis when he’s scared, and Gladio when he’s hurt. He doesn’t need to think about it.

So he goes to Gladio, and he looks his Shield in the eyes, and he can’t bring himself to say anything.

Judging by Gladio’s expression, he doesn’t need to.

They sit close, the only two people left in the world of darkness and roaming daemons, and Noctis is so, so scared of being alone, but Ignis isn’t here. Gladio is. There, and warm, and solid, and alive. It makes him feel warm, too.

He doesn’t know if what he feels is desire or loneliness, but Gladio keeps _looking_ , like Noctis is his only light, and Noctis _wants_ that, wants to be the center of Gladio’s attention, it must count for _something_ , so why the hell not?

They fuck frantically and wildly, like animals, and afterwards Gladio holds him tight and trembles. Noctis lets him.

“You’re all I have now,” he says, with Gladio’s face held between his hands. Part of it crumples at the words, as if in grief.

“Don’t say it like that,” Gladio begs.

“It’s always been like that,” Noctis replies. Through all of this madness, the first, the second, and now the third, Gladio has always been the one who’s stayed by his side the longest. The last to go.

He tells Noctis in person, at least.

Then he asks to die by Noctis’ hand.

Some part of Noctis’ mind recoils from the idea, but it’s distant, so distant.

Mostly, he thinks, _Maybe if I do this properly, I’ll get to wake up._

Gladio stands in front of him and doesn’t flinch as Noctis swings.

The blood makes a delicate filigree pattern on the haven stone. It stays there for just a moment before it begins to evaporate, dispersing its miasma into the air. The limbs of Gladio’s prone body twitch. Daemons roar.

Noctis turns his sword around and contemplates which way would be easier, heart or throat.

It’s so easy, it turns out. Point and stab.

It only hurts a moment.

**4.**

Noctis wakes up in the grass. Or – no, among flowers. Stalks of sylleblossoms hover motionless at the edges of his vision, framing the twilight sky above him.

He gets up.

The sunset is gorgeous. The entire landscape, this field of sylleblossoms that seems to float in thin air, is eerily familiar, and he pokes at that thought for a minute. He gets a faint impression of Gentiana, but nothing else.

There’s a rustle somewhere behind him, and he turns to look.

Luna.

Smiling, attired in Tenebrae white and breathtakingly beautiful – Luna.

“Dear Noctis,” she says, so gentle and loving, and something inside him trembles, and he almost dares hope he’s done.

Luna continues, still smiling, “I hope you have been in good spirits. I know that it has not been easy, and that the events of your youth have caused you a lot of pain, but trust me when I say that I merely wanted to offer you a second chance. I had accepted by own fate, but if there was anything I could do to give you a chance to be happy…”

She looks down, at her own clasped hands, and seems to ponder something for a moment.

“I knew it would not come without a price. For that, I am sorry, dear Noctis. If perhaps you resent me for doing what I did – putting you through the trials that have taken place, depriving you of your deserved rest – I understand. I would not begrudge you that feeling. But please know – “

Luna speaks, and Noctis listens, dazed and struggling to follow. It’s a flow of familiar sounds. He knows every word, and what they mean together and alone, but the impact keeps on not coming. Not even confusion. Maybe he’s lost the capacity to feel it.

Luna speaks, and Noctis feels horror claw its way out of his heart and into his head, because there are black lines crawling up Luna’s bare arms.

It doesn’t take long. Between one sentence and the next, the lines bleed together into one solid coat and make slow, but unstoppable progress over Luna’s body. The blackened parts warp and wither and bulge and pull the limbs into grotesque shapes, distorted and unnaturally bent. Skin cracks and pustules form and rupture and drip black ichor.

In under a minute, there stands a sickened, chimeral monster, with Luna’s head still attached and blond and smiling faintly. Lovingly.

It keep speaking, serene, as if nothing’s happening.

Noctis recoils and swallows back bile.

A freezing wind tears at him all of a sudden, and he jams his eyes closed. Its noise in his ears drowns out Luna’s voice.

Something cold lands on him, brought by the wind, and he opens his eyes a crack.

There’s a blizzard going on.

Everything is white.

He can’t see further than a few feet in front of himself, and even that distance shrinks with every moment. The wall of rushing snow surrounds him on all sides. It sticks to him, burning cold.

Feeling leeches out of his fingers first, and only then does he gather his wits enough to stick his hands in his armpits and huddle, but it does little good. The wind changes directions on a whim, coming at him from the left one second and from behind the other, and there’s no shielding he can do. He can barely move.

He doesn’t think to move.

He’s so tired.

The cold creeps in, in and in and in, until all of him is a foreign substance and he feels nothing, inside and outside. It might not be so bad, to let the cold take him. Maybe he’ll be done this time. Maybe it’ll be over.

He should know better. Still. Maybe.

Briefly, he feels a pressure in his chest, but even that fades quickly, and then he feels nothing at all.

**5.**

Noct wakes up pinned to the ground by a body. Everything around him is burning and stinks of charred meat and melting plastic, and the Marilith wears his mother’s forgotten face. His father doesn’t come.

_Of course my father won’t come_ , he thinks. _This is what I was born for. I don’t get to be saved_.

His mother runs him through with a sword, again and again and again.

**6.**

What a farce.

Ardyn.

Indeed. I assume you’ve been watching? All of your loved ones, living their lives happily and to the fullest, like you never meant anything to them. Hurts, doesn’t it?

No.

Really? Noctis, dearest, the Astrals may have tried to mold you into something less like you and more like them, but you were born human. You died… not quite human, maybe, but that’s not what counts. What _counts,_ is how you _lived_. How you _loved_. It’s a very human thing, love. The Astrals have something a bit like it, but it’s different, really. Some are more attuned to it than others. The Infernian, he burned with emotions like a wildfire, all untamed: wrath, lust, two sides of the same coin. The Glacian claimed to have loved, but she just wanted the object of her affections preserved forever, inert and undecaying. The rest, well. I believe them to be disinclined.

But back to the topic. The ones _you_ love, Noct. Look – they don’t even mourn. They look through photos once every few years, and it’s, ‘Oh, hey, here’s Noct, we sure had some good times together. Too bad he had to die.’ Callous, positively. Don’t you think so?

I told you, no.

Did you now. Hmm.

Are you sure it’s me you’re trying to convince?

It’s okay to be human, Noct. Now that most of this mess is behind you, it’s actually okay.

Shut up.

I think I’d rather keep talking. I don’t much care if you mind. See, you’re no longer the Chosen King, Noct-o. You have no more obligations before the Astral lot. You’ll do well to get that through your skull sometime today.

Fuck off.

Lovely. Thank you, but no. Don’t you see, Noct? This animosity? This frantic denial? It’s human, too. It’s good. I may not look like I care, but I’d rather at least one of us retained that quality.

I said, fuck off!

Alright, alright. Stew in your own ruminations for a minute. Might even do you good.

Am I dead?

Who knows? I’m sure a certain holy maiden will put in a good word. Might be, she already has.

All calmed down now? Good, good. I do hope you’re not just suppressing everything again, it’s not healthy.

Oh, but this is the last one, Noct. Are you ready? You know, your father was supposed to do this one. Come back full circle and all that. But – I’ve decided to butt in. Show more mercy than the great and mighty Astrals. Or, Astral, I suppose. Singular. There’s just one left, thanks to your, quote-unquote, efforts.

By the way, on the topic of Astrals. Allow me a little tangent before the main event. Have you ever wondered how creatures like voretooths function? Or mesmenir? Catoblepas? Where are their digestive tracts hiding? Where, indeed. And of course, there are creatures like, say, the griffons – how could something so bizarre have evolved on its own? The good professor Yaeger was right to be suspicious.

Have you ever wondered what they eat? Or, better yet, what the byproduct looks like? I’ll give you a hint: it is very, very small, and it absorbs light.

Oh, the Astrals sure love to say they’ve _protected_ our Eos, but did anyone invite them? Did the humanity of yore call out to distant stars, asking to be protected? Did the planet? I don’t mean to be droll, by the way, I am completely serious – the planet could have, but I have absolutely no idea if it did.

Either way, what they actually did was move in, and the landlord should really have insisted on a no-pet policy, because there was no end to the mess. And the new tenants’ clean-up methods were rather… extreme, shall we say.

Hilarious, isn’t it? Such tragedy, all because some waste ended up on the wrong planet.

But now, now that the whole mess is cleaned up, our insufferable tenants are finally getting evicted. In a… Similarly, _extreme_ manner. What Eos giveth, Eos taketh away, and all that. Oh, did you think our kind gods came by their godly powers all on their own? You probably did. Oh well. I’ll just tell you: no, they didn’t. They got them on loan – that’s probably a very kind way of putting it, actually. Pretty much like saying that a street gang you encountered in a dark alley borrowed your phone. Not the best analogy, but it gets the gist across.

You’re probably wondering – but what does all this have to do with you? Hmm. Well, everything! See… To continue our apartment analogy, let’s say that when the good Astrals moved in, there was some furniture in the units. And now that they’re moving out, Eos would really like it if they left it behind, because it _doesn’t belong to them_. It is really rather adamant. Only, the whole, _Crystal_ and _magic_ and _covenants_ business… It rather complicates matters, I’m afraid. And besides, that furniture is quite fancy. Why would anyone want to part with that?

Now, you, Noct – you’ve been soaking in Eos’ shackled little soul for years. Like a sponge. Most of it went into the ring, of course, but the important bits, the anchors of our dear Astrals – they went in _you_.

You’re a battlefield, my dear. Or a slaughterhouse. Depends on the viewpoint, really.

Care to guess, now, why the mighty Draconian was so insistent on your passing? Oh, there are side effects to their little parlor trick, naturally, and you probably wouldn’t have survived on your own, but do you honestly believe that a power that governs all life on the planet couldn’t have spared yours? Pff. Eos is so much more than parlor tricks.

See, Noct, if you’d died immediately, like they’d wanted, _they would’ve gotten away with it_. That’s it. That’s your punchline.

Luckily for you, Eos is not going down without a fight. It just so happens that the fight has to take place inside your fragile little human mind. Eos is not big on plans, that’s really an Astral thing.

Remember I said, battlefield or slaughterhouse? Well, you’re also both of the warring sides at once. Or both the butcher and the pigs. Oh, and the cleaver, too, probably. It’s very confusing, I know. Just remember, this is all inside your mind, so even I, technically, am a part of you. Now, what do you think – am I Ardyn, or am I just your image of him, come to taunt you as your psyche gets sliced to ribbons in a celestial game of tug-of-war? Wouldn’t you like to know. By the way, you’re holding up pretty well, all things considered.

Anyway, that’s not important right now. What’s important is – there’s just one left. Only one more, and then it’s all over, for real this time. No more meddling, no more plans, no… I don’t know. You’ll be free. And I as well, naturally. But you just have to do, _one,_ more _._

I’m afraid it’s not exactly optional. But it’s worth it, I promise you.

I never hated you, you know. Not _you_ , personally. Just everything you stood for. The Astrals and their plans. And I suppose we’re both victims in this, at the end of the day.

It’s going to be alright, Noct. It’s aaall going to be alright. Just bear this for a moment. Then it’ll get better. I promise.

It’ll just hurt a moment, kiddo.

Noctis Lucis Caelum sits on his father’s throne, with his father’s sword in his chest, his father’s silent ghost standing over him, and his father’s gentle smile-

**∞.**

_Great job, Noct!_ Carbuncle chirps, straight into his head. It sits, prim and proper, tail wrapped around its paws, and glows like it never had before. _I knew I was right to trust in you._

In its eyes, lightning flashes and fire burns.

**7.**

Noctis wakes up in a hospital bed, in a room with chipped walls and old furniture. Gladio stands nearby, looking like he’s coming out of a week-long bender; Ignis sits on the other side. Both of them are thrilled to see him awake.

He’s pretty certain he’d been dreaming for a while. He feels like he knows more than he used to, like some fundamental and terrible knowledge has been imparted on him, but whenever he tries to focus, it slips through his grasp like fog, only to settle at the edges of awareness, never quite fading, and it bothers him too much to leave it alone.

If the rest of his life feels distant, well.

Noctis knows this: he was a king. The last one.

It’s enough.

**–.**

_I did it to keep an eye on them, you know?_

Carbuncle prances gracefully along the marble balustrade of the balcony. The setting sun colors its cyan fur yellow and plum.

_You can’t really see a lot from inside the Crystal. So while they were putting me in there, I broke a small part of myself away. I just wanted to make sure. And good thing I did!_

“They couldn’t tell?” Noctis asks.

_Oh, no. They wouldn’t have let that little piece act as a Messenger if they did. They were sticklers for their rules like that._

All the pieces had to be in their exact places. Move exactly as they were told to. Noctis is intimately familiar with that side of the Astrals.

The breeze is cool this high up. Noctis leans a hip on the balustrade and looks down at his city, the flow of people way below. It’s nowhere near what it used to be, in numbers, but that’s alright. At least there’s life. He’ll make sure it stays there.

Maybe that’s the answer. He asks anyway.

“Why did you help me?”

_Which time? When you were a child? Or when you helped the rest of me break free?_

“Both.”

_Hmm._ Carbuncle sits down, facing Noctis. The gem in its forehead catches the sunlight and shines unnaturally. _As a child, I suppose I thought you were my ticket out of that rock, for one thing. For another, you were the only guarantee that life would persist on **this** rock. Hate to admit it, but I had no better plan. Decisions had to be made very quickly. Had I more time, I might have come up with something that involved less sacrifice and meddling, but I noticed too late, and by then the situation was dire. Bahamut offered a way at the right time. It had seemed like the best course of action to agree. Life would persevere, and a couple thousand years is hardly an inconvenience. So yes, I was aboard with the plan, until the very last second. The plan **you** were an integral part of. Besides, I was the one who chose you. It would be strange to give you a task and then leave you all alone with it, wouldn’t it?_

“You… chose me?”

_I did! Or, well, the part of me that was still in the Crystal did. Time was running short. That ill man was stirring up trouble, and the disease was still spreading, despite the blessed line’s efforts. I was going to pick your father, but… Something felt off. There was such pain in him. I couldn’t._

_But when I chose you, I didn’t just do it because there was no time left. I felt… I felt a resonance between us. I saw a heart that loved all kinds of life. I thought we were similar. So I chose you._

“I was five,” Noctis says, tone bordering on incredulous.

Carbuncle tips its head to the side, like a confused dog. _So?_

After a brief silence, Carbuncle says, _Your core hasn’t changed._ It gets to its feet and trots over to Noctis, where it touches his hand with a warm paw. _I can still feel it. The resonance._

_As for the other time, well,_ it turns its back to Noctis and starts traipsing down the balustrade again, _Can I just say I liked you? I’ve always been fond of youngsters of all kinds. They’re the future of life, so I like them better than adults. And I’d already liked you when you were a child. You may look different now, but nothing else has changed, as far as I’m concerned._

_And, hey,_ it twirls around with a flourish of its tail, and its eyes twinkle and grin, _I owed you one, didn’t I? I’m familiar with the concept. I didn’t exactly need persuasion._

The wind ruffles the tips of Carbuncle’s ears. Noctis thinks.

“Will I get better?” he asks.

Carbuncle’s whiskers twitch, then droop slightly.

_It will take time,_ it says, _and peace. Have patience, Noct. It’ll get easier. I wouldn’t take the joy of living from you like that._

“Could you help me one more time, then?”

Its voice in Noctis’ head is apologetic.

_No, Noctis. Sorry. It’s not a wound, but a defense mechanism. That’s not as simple to fix as making tissue regrow. Just give it time. Eventually, your mind will adjust again. To better things, this time._

The sun, bleeding red and orange, comes down to brush the edge of the Wall and lights up Carbuncle’s eyes. They glow like the heart of a campfire, like the gentle radiance of the Oracle’s healing and the translucent shards of Regis’ magic and the intense purple light of the Crystal. Noctis gets the feeling that if he looks into them long enough, he’ll see the world in its entirety: the huge rock flying through space and the cellular structure of a single pine needle and the equations that make the rivers flow. The blazing, lucent, magic-oozing heart of Eos.

_I’ll check up on you again, okay?_ Carbuncle trills. _For now, there’s work that I need to do. The illness left so many scars, entire species missing. I can’t leave it all untended just yet. You just live your life, all right? Try not to hurt too much. It doesn’t matter what those six thieves told you._

In the flaming sunset, its fur looks the same color as the sun.

_You have my blessing, Noct,_ it lets him know, gently. _Live. Live the way you want._

And with the last bit of sun vanishing behind the Wall, Carbuncle disappears.

Noctis turns away from the view and heads inside.

**Author's Note:**

> Fuckin’ Hypnagogia. 
> 
> I swear, half the time I was like, would you just fucking cooperate? and the fic was like, you don’t own me, bitch.
> 
> It challenged me in all the best of ways.
> 
> You have my blessing, you zero-chill, mofo of a fic.
> 
> A bit off-topic: does anyone know why AO3 capitalizes some tags entered w/o caps and leaves others alone? It's so weird :/


End file.
